The steady thump of techno music spills from a portable speaker as they wind their way toward service. They’ll turn out 300 plates tonight, each one featuring a bed of couscous piled high with harissa-roasted carrots and a hearty Moroccan beef stew with chickpeas and spinach. A sprinkling of cilantro brightens every serving.

This is the home of the Double Trellis Food Initiative, where a group of chefs trained in the world of fine dining are cooking to feed those in need. They once served the city’s upper crust, but tonight their food will be heading to community fridges, mutual aid efforts, and youth programs, where it will feed those facing food and housing insecurity in America’s poorest large city.

With an estimated 15 percent of the population navigating food insecurity, Double Trellis aims to improve the quality of meals these residents receive from a vast network of food banks, soup kitchens, organizations, and agencies.

Since its start during the pandemic, Double Trellis has developed from a fledgling operation into an established nonprofit with two full-time and five part-time employees, workforce development for juvenile offenders trying to straighten out their lives, and waste-reduction programs.

The organization receives roughly $400,000 in annual funding from donations, philanthropies, and government agencies, helping its chefs serve more than 55,000 meals last year. As the Trump administration seeks to shrink the public safety net, Double Trellis is deepening its commitment to communities facing increased need.

“Everyone deserves dignified food made from real ingredients by people who care,” says Adrien Carnecchia, a history teacher turned pastry chef who started volunteering with Double Trellis three years ago when it was still a ragtag operation turning out one offering each week.

Today, he and his colleagues send, to two dozen partner organizations across the city, four different meals each week—an evolving menu that recently featured chicken adobo, veggie fajitas, frittatas with potato-and-pepper hash, and butternut squash curry. The cuisine changes, but the food is always nutritious, filling, and flavorful.

The Origins of Double Trellis

Stebbins has been a chef most of his life, training under James Beard nominee Townsend Wentz and then manning the sauté station at Laurel, once named a top 10 restaurant in the country and the best in Philadelphia. But as his career progressed, so did his drug and alcohol addictions. At his professional peak, he was unhoused and struggled to reliably access food—let alone treatment. He spent five years on and off the streets, he says, before leaving the city to get sober.

When he returned to Philadelphia, Stebbins worked at a catering company whose business cratered at the start of the pandemic. When protests erupted a few months later after the murder of George Floyd, he had time and wanted to help. He rallied some friends to cook and feed the protesters, but quickly realized he should instead be serving the unhoused people he was marching past. Their grateful response to being offered a hot meal as simple as a breakfast burrito showed him the void he’s sought to fill ever since.

“There’s a difference between skipping lunch and not eating for three days,” Stebbins says, recalling a moment in 2015 when he was at his lowest. “That sort of debilitating pain isn’t just in your body; it’s in your heart and soul. I think about that often when I get tired. There’s absolutely no reason in the richest nation in the world why that should be happening to anyone.”

When it launched in 2020, Double Trellis—its name drawn from the system Stebbins’ grandfather used as a grape farmer in New York decades ago—hand-delivered meals to unhoused people and soon began placing a portion of their food in a community fridge accessible to all for free. In March 2021, the organization began operating a fridge of its own in Kensington, a neighborhood that has long been the epicenter of the opioid epidemic in Philadelphia.

In that first full year, Double Trellis served around 10,000 meals, split between direct service and community fridges, which surged in popularity and prominence when the pandemic pushed food insecurity into the spotlight. Philadelphia was home to more than 30 community fridges at one point, most of which still exist.

The one Stebbins helped establish has since moved to the LAVA Center in West Philadelphia, closer to Double Trellis’ base of operations, and still receives some of the organization’s meals. Two others—The People’s Fridge, just a few blocks away, and the South Philadelphia Community Fridge—are the main recipients of meals made during this Friday night service.

For Staff, a Refuge and Source of Strength

The effort seems to be working. By last year, Double Trellis’ service had expanded nearly sixfold, even as it sought to broaden its impact by introducing a workforce development program for juvenile offenders. Through a partnership with YEAH Philly, which offers support for teens and young adults impacted by violence, Stebbins and his team spent four months teaching their first two young trainees the skills necessary to get a job in the food industry.

The trainees were paid $17 an hour and had externships at candymaker Shane Confectionery and Honeysuckle Provisions, an acclaimed Afrocentric restaurant. Both are now ServSafe certified in food safety and handling practices, which will make them more employable in the food industry. More importantly, both have had their juvenile court cases dismissed with support from YEAH’s legal team, according to co-CEO Kendra Van de Water.

Shamp Johnson, now 18, came to Double Trellis wanting to learn how to cook for himself and his mother. During the training program, he sharpened his knife skills, learned to navigate a professional kitchen, and fell in love with cooking. The relationships he built will stay with him, he says.

“Matt came from a similar lifestyle as me,” Johnson says. “He really showed me that whatever you put your mind to you can do. You really can achieve [it]. That really opened my eyes up, his whole story and what he’d been through. Now all I want is a job cooking.”

The organization’s second group of trainees is set to start this spring, remaining small so its members receive undivided attention, Stebbins says.

The project is in good company in Philadelphia, where other initiatives share a similar goal. The Monkey and the Elephant, a café in the Brewerytown neighborhood, trains and employs former foster youth as they transition into adulthood, while Down North Pizza in Strawberry Mansion exclusively employs the formerly incarcerated. Philabundance, the largest food bank in the region, offers a 16-week culinary vocational training program for those with low or no income.

For Van de Water, who met Stebbins when Double Trellis began contributing meals to the free, youth-staffed grocery store YEAH operates, the program is helping to change how the Philadelphia community views teens affected by poverty, racism, and violence.

“It’s about investing directly into young people so they can have opportunities and things they haven’t had access to before—so they can get the life they deserve and want,” Van de Water says.

Carnecchia developed the curriculum, which includes one hour each day of classroom education—such as math skills for kitchen measurements and recipe building—and five hours in the kitchen. “It’s the hardest thing I’ve done here, by far,” he says, but also the most rewarding.

Stebbins hopes to expand the program if funding allows; last year, he says, Double Trellis’ revenue was around $400,000, including personal donations, support from private philanthropies like the Claneil Foundation, and backing from the Pennsylvania Commission on Crime and Delinquency. This year, the Philadelphia Department of Public Health began contributing funds.

Forecasting an Increased Need

The organization hasn’t been directly affected by the attempt to slash federal government spending that has frozen funding for farmers, Stebbins says, but he anticipates a trickle-down effect. The kitchen sources most of its produce and meat from Sharing Excess, a food rescue nonprofit, and the Carversville Farm Foundation. Now, Stebbins is worried about food donations declining or drying up if his partners’ work is hampered. “Anyone [working to address] food insecurity is pretty nervous right now,” he says.

For Mads Pryor, a Double Trellis cook who has worked in kitchens for 15 years, most recently as private chef for a wealthy family in Philadelphia’s ritzy Main Line suburbs, working to address food insecurity is more important than ever. “We see the cost of groceries rising, an uptick in health issues, and not enough structural support for the citizens of Philadelphia and this country,” Pryor says.

These challenges underscore the need for Double Trellis’ workforce development program. As Stebbins points out, food and housing insecurity are deeply rooted, tangled up with poverty and the systemic failures that allow it to persist.

“Meals are just a stopgap,” he says, “not a solution.”

In the long term, Stebbins hopes Double Trellis can do more to make a difference. The kitchen’s emphasis on reducing food waste is part of that equation. Last year, it used 40,000 pounds of excess food rescued by Sharing Excess and composted 10,000 more. Meanwhile, Double Trellis makes the most of its ingredients. Lemon peels, for example, are preserved in salt and used in vinaigrettes and slaws.

To further expand its impact, Double Trellis hopes to find a kitchen of its own, which would make it possible to prepare breakfasts and lunches and triple its output to 1,000 meals a day, Stebbins says. His long-term vision includes nutrition workshops and cooking classes for the community, and more culinary training for young people.

For now, though, he and his colleagues are simply responding to the need they see as best they can.

“We have to care for our community,” Carnecchia says. “We have to care for our neighbors.”